Well it was bound to happen. Boycotting Glenn Beck was bound to ruffle some feathers and it has though maybe only a smaller one. Brad Wardell CEO of Stardock Games in protest of the UPS boycott of Glenn Beck might be switching his company's shipping from UPS to FedEx.
Details after the jump.
Stardock Games is a PC publisher who has published some interesting well made games in my opinion. Their latest title was Demigod. They were founded by Brad Wardell, a Texas born game designer.Wardell is someone I've been following because of his outspoken (and enlightened) views on piracy and DRM.
From Ars Technia:
"The reason why we don't put copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count," Wardell argues. "When Sins [of a Solar Empire] popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue."
He claims on his blog that this is not about protecting Glenn Beck. He was annoyed by the public yanking of all UPS ads from Fox News. Wardell said:
Now, for most normal people, picking UPS or FedEx is like picking Little Caesars vs. Pizza Hutt (no offense to shipping companies or Pizza companies – before I start getting emails about that).
I wasn’t making a moral pronouncement on what UPS had done. I was simply annoyed by what they were doing and decided to pick a different shipper.
He explains his argument in an update to the post. He equates a boycott with sacrificing something, and argues that since he's not actually sacrificing anything by switching shippers it's not a boycott (hence the "moral pronouncement" line.
With UPS issuing a statement that they are not pulling adds from Fox and are instead airing them now (though likely not on Glenn Beck) the situation might have blown over some. But it's interesting to see the ripples of such a thing. Perhaps it is old news, but I hadn't seen it here and since I am a gamer, Stardock is a good name in the industry. So I thought it might be interesting to the rest of the site since DRM is a pernicious problem in the games industry.